The Long Walk Home

Yeh faasle teri galiyon ke humse tay na huey, hazaar baar rukey hum hazaar baar chaley Na jaane kaun si mitti watan ki mitti thi, nazar mein dhool, jigar mein liye ghubaar chaley - Gulzar Seventy-one-year-old Baksh wakes up one night in pain and ventures out in search of a doctor. In the time it takes him to reach a hospital, his heart irretrievably damaged, he travels down memory lane, reliving his life lived in the border town of Ferozepur, Punjab-from pre-Partition India, to the holocaust that accompanied independence, the Indo-Pak wars, the Green Revolution and the rise of religious extremism. Increasingly isolated in the terror-infested eighties, an era of curfews, encounters and hit lists, his world all but falls apart as his wife falls under the spell of a rabid preacher; his best friend, a Hindu, flees the town; the Bar Council where he works cleaves along religious lines; and he himself makes an error of judgement that could have serious security ramifications. As he nears the end of his walk, and his life, he wonders: will there ever be a redemption, a homecoming? Redolent of the soil and the spirit of Punjab, The Long Walk Home is as much one man's odyssey through tumultuous times as it is an elegiac meditation on the passing of a way of life, on faith and fundamentalism and misguided passions.